Monday, 28 February 2011

Steampunk at Waterstones and the Vitruvian Fankenstein...

Wotcher all,

We're all pretty excited here at Abaddon Towers, as we're just sending Jon Green's seventh Ulysses Quicksilver adventure, Pax Britannia: Anno Frankenstein, to the printers. That means it's now only a matter of weeks away from hitting the shelves!

In Anno Frankenstein, dandy and adventurer Ulysses finds himself thrust back in time to the Second Great European War, to combat the horrific super-soldiers of Germany's top-secret Frankenstein Corps. Among other terrors, he will fight with - or alongside - werewolves, vampires, the extraordinary Edward Hyde, the beautiful agents of the Monstrous Regiment, and his own father, Hercules.

Quicksilver's (now, I suppose, "the Quicksilvers'") adventures are continuing to make a stir out there in the steampunkophile world, as evidenced at Waterstones's flagship store in Picadilly, which has put up this Steampunk promotional display.

Note particularly that we make two appearances on the shelf, which we share with some extremely good company - something that, otherwise, only China Mieville seems to have achieved:

This is what Waterstones's "Dave" has to say about the Quicksilver Omnibus:

"That's always good news, surely?" We certainly like to think so, Dave.

Anyway, the very last thing we put together for the book was a kind of "Vitruvian Frankenstein," named in honour of da Vinci's most famous sketch, to put in the section headers (to understand why, buy and read the book...). Our brilliant artist and designer Pye Parr drew it for us, and we thought we'd share it with you:

Just to get your juices flowing even more, be aware that this will be available as a free downloadable desktop, on a lovely old-paper background, a little closer to the launch date. Keep your eyes on the blog!